


i can't touch what i can see

by signifier



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: M/M, are there plot holes? probably, do i care? no, ray is dead so uve been warned, secret skeleton event, tw electrocution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-13 09:03:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21241577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signifier/pseuds/signifier
Summary: It’s almost certainly a ‘Do Not’ in the rules of the supernatural, Jeremy thinks; you’re definitely not allowed to date the ghost haunting your apartment.





	i can't touch what i can see

**Author's Note:**

  * For [grifs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grifs/gifts).

> for connor, my own battle buddy, this time im writing for u! i love u dangerous dude nd i hope u enjoy

_Woke up in your new apartment,_

_In your twin-size bed, _

_Coffee starting,_

_-_

It’s almost certainly a ‘Do Not’ in the rules of the supernatural, Jeremy thinks; you’re definitely not allowed to date the ghost haunting your apartment.

-

‘So, what happened to the last guy to live here? The place was awfully cheap,’ Jeremy asks the landlord when he moves in.

The landlord, his nametag so old it only provides the letters E and G, doesn’t even look at Jeremy, just hands him the keys and grunts ‘electrocution’.

‘Oh, right.’

‘Ray was a dumb kid who had it coming.’ That’s all he says on the matter.

Jeremy smiles, makes a mental note to avoid this man as much as possible.

-

The apartment makes it three nights before things start to happen.

Jeremy keeps catching glimpses of a face in reflective surfaces, one that is definitely not his own, just for a second before he blinks and it’s gone again. Items just laying around move ever so slightly when he next comes to them. He woke up one morning to find the kettle turned on and boiling. Coincidences, he was sure. Arriving home one day from the office, Jeremy finds the stack of post-it notes on his coffee table have the faintest of pencil markings on them, the letters R and A being the most prominent.

It’s not until he steps out of the shower one evening, having finally found where the knob has to be for the perfect temperature, that he thinks he might have a celestial roommate.

Written on the steam of the mirror is a single word.

_Hell_

His heart stops, watching a bead of condensation run down the mirror like it’d been written seconds ago. A light shiver runs down his back.

‘Fuck no.’ Jeremy protests, scooping a towel off the floor and erasing the message as quick as he can. He flips the light switch off and backs out of the room, not taking his eye off the door until he’s safely in the corner of the small corridor of his hallway. He stands there for a while, silent apart from his laboured breathing before booking it towards his bedroom and practically diving into bed. Though it takes him a while, Jeremy manages to fall asleep.

-

He brings it up the next time he sees Geoff and Jack. They’re sitting in a coffee shop, Jeremy staring into space and barely registering the argument they’re having over whose turn it was to take out the trash last night when he interrupts them.

‘Do you guys believe in ghosts?’

There’s a pause as the pair turns to him, and then they speak in unison; Geoff giving a serious ‘yes’ as Jack scoffs out a ‘no’.

‘Why? You being haunted? Cause I don’t want any part of that, you can fuck up the ghost yourself.’

Jeremy smiles, ‘I don’t know, weird shit keeps happening in my apartment. Apparently the last guy to live there was electrocuted.’

‘Yikes.’

‘Yikes is right.’

‘It’s probably just a coincidence, or you’re paranoid. It happens; moving into a new place,’ Jack shrugs.

Jeremy’s not convinced.

Geoff must sense it, because he lays a hand on his shoulder. ‘Listen, sure way to know is that if you wake up randomly at 3am; it’s a ghost.’

‘3am?’ Jeremy questions, ignoring the way Jack rolls his eyes and shakes his head.

Geoff grins. ‘Witching hour.’

-

It’s the cold that wakes Jeremy.

A sudden drop of temperature despite how tangled in his sheets he is has him stirring awake and blindly reaching out to turn on the lamp to his right. He sits up, lets the duvet pool in his lap as he rubs the sleep out of his eyes before looking up. He’s not sure he isn’t dreaming when he first sees it, but the fear raising from his stomach feels real.

Standing at the end of his bed is a figure.

A figure, and not a person, because this being is an entirely grey mass. It’s slim, and maybe it’s the bad lighting but it seems to be fading in and out of reality as he looks at it. They stare at each other; Jeremy’s eyes wide as he’s drawn into the void of the shape. It’s odd – Jeremy always thought it was seeing a face in the middle of the night that would scare him, but this passive nothingness is so much worse. He doesn’t want to look away, memories of some monster that only moved when you weren’t looking at it seeping into his brain. He’d have to thank Gavin for his British TV knowledge if he makes it out of this alive.

And then it’s gone. Just fades out like it was never there.

Jeremy takes a second, watches the space it used to occupy to make sure it’s gone before reaching out a shaky hand and checking the time on his phone. The clock reads 3:06am.

He sleeps on the couch after that.

-

Strange things kept happening then, though Jeremy tried his hardest to ignore them. Doors opened and closed without him touching them, taps turned on, his neatly made pile of Xbox games looked like they’d been searched through. The pencil he keeps on his table ends up on the floor so often that Jeremy stops trying to pick it up. One night, he comes to find it back on the table.

It’s not until he’s making dinner one night that the reason for these occurrences makes itself known.

Jeremy has his back to the rest of his apartment, knife in hand as he chops up potatoes and hums whatever theme song has taken hold of his mind that day.

‘Dude, is that Spyro?’

Jeremy whirls round at the speech, throwing the knife in his hand on instinct when he sees someone standing behind him.

The blade goes straight through the man’s torso, clattering to the living room floor and sliding somewhere underneath the couch. The person looks down at his chest, then back up at Jeremy.

‘Is that how you treat all your guests?’

Jeremy almost faints on the spot. He reaches towards the counter, gripping hard as panic starts to creep in, the haunting feeling of goose bumps starting to get more intense.

The man looks at him with a certain worried regard, head cocked slightly to the side. ‘Dude, are you okay? You’re white as a ghost.’

The fucker laughs. Which, okay, Jeremy does too but it’s more of a high-pitched exhale of breath than anything else. He lets his legs buckle, slides down his cabinets to sit on the floor and extends his legs out in front of him so he can breathe easier.

Apparition man is patient, stops looking at him after a while and takes glances around the flat. There’s a wishful look on his face.

‘You’re Ray,’ Jeremy manages to push out, when his skin stops trying to crawl away from him.

‘I am. You’re the guy whose living in my house,’ he continues when he realises Jeremy’s just going to continue staring up at him from the floor, ‘you’re Jeremy. I read your name on your mail.’

‘That’s, um, sure. Okay.’

Ray walks towards the counters, looks like he’s going to lean back against them before stopping in his movements and putting his hands in his pockets instead. ‘Didn’t mean to scare you. I’ve been trying to contact you for, god, so fucking long. Post-it notes and mirrors, I even tried straight up appearing like this, but that takes a shit ton of effort. I’m more practiced now.’

‘That was you? The mirror?’ Jeremy uses the cabinets to pull himself off the floor and reaches over to turn the heat off the stove. Dinner had long been abandoned.

The ghost nods, like it was obvious.

‘God,’ Jeremy lets out a relived laugh, runs his hands down his face, ‘that scared the shit out of me, you bastard.’

‘Sorry. Did have a good laugh that it was the final letter I seemed to fade out on,’ Ray grins, completely unapologetic.

‘I really thought some higher power was trying to tell me something,’ Jeremy sighs with a smile, fear slowly slipping away the more Ray spoke.

Ray laughs, the soft image he projects brightening as he does so. ‘I mean, I am a higher power; higher than you for sure.’

Jeremy rolls his eyes, would have reached out and playfully shoved him too, but wasn’t quite show how physics and ghosts work. ‘That a crack on my height?’

‘Obviously.’

-

So Jeremy’s living in a haunted apartment.

He thought it would be terrifying, knowing for sure that ghosts are real, but it becomes a comfort to know that the banging coming from the living room is Ray trying to levitate the couch, or that the missing knife out of his set is meant to be a joke, not an actual murderer hiding somewhere.

Ray’s a nice guy – funny, and it’s sort of like having a roommate in the way he’ll demand Jeremy plays a video game so he can watch or turns the hot water on so he can practice writing on the mirror. They watch movies together, Ray complaining whenever Jeremy says he hasn’t seen a certain film. They sit a little too close on the couch, hands would be touching if Ray had the ability.

But Jeremy can’t get the landlords voice out of his head – a single word.

_Electrocution._

Because Jeremy had a picture of a ghost in his head; hair standing on end, clothes frazzled, the smell of burnt flesh haunting wherever they go. Ray didn’t look at all like he’d been through that. Ray didn’t look like he’d been through anything.

‘You wanna know what happened, don’t you?’ Ray asks one day, catching Jeremy staring as he tries to pick up a crisp Jeremy placed on the arm of the sofa.

‘I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious.’

‘I got electrocuted. What a dumb fucking way to go.’ The crisp shifts, only slightly, and Ray gasps.

Jeremy claps, urges him to explain more.

‘So I had this Playstation right, and I was like, wow, I sure would love to be able to play COD and have a bath at the same time.’

Jeremy can see where this story is going.

‘Got myself an extension cord,’ Ray continues, ‘balanced the TV on the toilet and the console on the edge of the bath. It was going great, until I got a bit too excited at one of my kills and the fucking thing fell in.’

‘Fucking hell.’

‘Can you imagine the look on the guys face who found me? “What a fucking dickhead,”’ Ray places his hands on his hips, shakes his head as he imitates an older man.

“The betrayal, too! I’d done nothing but love her.’

‘Her?’ Jeremy questions, a sort of disappointment settling in his stomach at the word.

‘Duh, all consoles are girls,’ Ray answers, cheering when the crisp slips off the arm of the seat.

Jeremy rolls his eyes and leans down to place it back on the sofa, hiding his smile.

-

It wasn’t always like that, laughs and jokes of the past. There was something darker about Ray. Sometimes, Jeremy would wake to find the apartment freezing; he’d go out to tease his roommate, ask him to stop whatever he’s doing. He’d find Ray standing in the hallway, staring at a crack in the wallpaper with his eyes glazed over and a crackling sort of energy surrounding his form. The lights would flicker and jump. It stormed once, a terrible phenomenon that shook the whole building. Jeremy wasn’t entirely sure that Ray hadn’t been the cause. He’d had never been scared of Ray since they met, but in those moments there was something awfully unsettling about the figure, and Ray; Ray never seemed aware that he was doing it.

All of the energy built, until Jeremy walks in in-time to see a pencil slip out of Rays hand, a loud curse coming from the ghost before he tries to angrily slam his hand down on the kitchen counter. The lack of contact seems to add to the simmering anger.

There’s a difference, he notices, between the image of Ray’s spectral body glowing with bliss and the harsh figure flickering in and out before him. It’s almost like static, the way the grey pulses bitterly – like a storm caged in a single cosmic form.

‘Ray?’ It’s still a surprise to him, that you can make a ghost jump. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Okay?’ Ray drags out the word, ‘I’m perfectly okay, y’know, I love being stuck in my old apartment and not being able to touch anything or leave. I love watching you get to live your life and sleep in my room and eat food and play games. So yeah, I’m real fucking okay.’

With a flash of light, the bulb hanging from the ceiling shatters, Ray’s mood fizzling out with it.

‘I’m sorry,’ He looks lost, reaching out instinctively to pick up the pieces before stopping himself, hand curling into a fist.

Jeremy wishes he could do something, say something that would help, hug him for the slightest bit of comfort but before he can decide on the right move Ray sighs and disappears from view. Jeremy steps forward, avoiding the glass to stand in the space that Ray used to occupy. Ironic, he thinks, as isn’t that what he’s doing in this apartment? He’s not even sure the ghost is still in the room, so he stops himself from speaking to the air and turns back to his bedroom. The mess on his patterned carpet can wait for now.

-

It's a while before Jeremy sees Ray again.

The light in his living room remains broken, Jeremy no longer needing to focus on avoiding the broken glass as it becomes part of his décor.

His logic is; if he doesn’t clean up the glass, that means that Ray was real, and all of his happened and he didn’t make Ray up in his head like Jack keeps suggesting.

He has to be real, because the heavy weight that lives in his heart has to have a reason for being there.

Jeremy lays awake at night, listens for the creaks of the apartment and jumps out of bed to check them. He focuses too hard on the changes of temperature and overanalyses being pulled from sleep in the middle of the night. He’s not sure how long he listens for, or when he stops checking the mirror once he’s showered or what day it is the first time he goes twenty four hours without a thought of Ray. The spirit lives, though, in the back of his mind and in a small corner of his heart.

-

‘I need to show you something.’

Jeremy’s barely through the door when Ray’s voice cuts through the low volume of his headphones. He turns, and there he is – same clothes, same stubble. There’s something off, though, Jeremy notices, as he can’t see the couch through his torso quite so clearly. There’s a dozen questions fighting for priority on his tongue but Ray takes a sledgehammer to his thought process with one move.

Ray takes his hand.

The touch is alarming, at first, Jeremy’s heart dropping to his stomach as Ray’s fingers ghost over his knuckles. Strange, is what it is – both there and not at the same time. It’s cold, too, but not like before. There’s a solid presence to it now, almost slipping into body temperature with how bright Ray’s burning. The grin on the spectre’s face is a welcome sight and Jeremy’s almost certain his pulse would be racing if he had one.

‘How did yo-‘

‘Practice. If I focus really hard, I can get myself to appear on your side. I don’t know how long it’ll last, it’s kind of draining.’

Jeremy places his hands on Ray’s shoulders, drags his hands down his arms just because he can.

‘Fuck _me_, Ray!’

Rays grin only grows; Jeremy has the brief thought that he won’t need to fix that light if Ray keeps smiling like this.

‘Well we could, but we’d have to be quick about it.’

The shorter man scoffs and lightly taps Ray’s shin with his foot – a move he’d had the urge to do since they became friends.

Ray’s smile falters, gaze dropping to the floor. ‘I’m sorry I left the way I did, I should have explained. I just…I needed time to get all of this under control.’

Jeremy kisses him.

It’s odd, kind of feels like pushing two opposing magnets towards each other, and a cold mouth is something Jeremy isn’t used to. It’s nice. Ray puts his hands on Jeremy’s face, the cool touch soothing against his heated cheeks, and it tingles with an electricity that Jeremy only wants more of. He’s finally able to wrap his hand in the front of that hoodie and pull him closer. Ray pulls back, presses their foreheads together and there’s a tint to his cheeks that Jeremy would almost call a blush.

‘Bout time,’ Ray grins.

‘You’re telling me.’

-

Jeremy’s sharing an apartment with a ghost. Kinda dating one, actually.

He no longer worries when he wakes at 3am and the temperature of the room drops so low that he shivers under the covers, he just closes his eyes and moves closer to the icy air against his arm and in his hand.

Geoff and Jack keep asking when they’ll get to meet this Ray that has Jeremy so smitten. Jeremy smiles and tells them, ‘Ray says over his dead body.’

Ray appreciates that one. Jeremy appreciates Ray.

Even now, as the covers move from where they lay idle on the bed as he starts to drift off to sleep; he smiles faintly.

Jeremy shifts to the left, just a little, just enough to feel a familiar cold presence wash over his skin.

-

_Now my bedsheets smell, _

_Like your cologne,_

_And in our separate world’s we sleep alone._


End file.
